Politics
How would Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quitting affect the Harris-Trump race?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to hold a news conference Friday in Phoenix to announce his exit from the presidential race, according to multiple media outlets, which also predicted that the scion of America’s greatest Democratic political dynasty would throw his support behind the Republican nominee, former President Trump.
It’s unclear how Kennedy‘s exit would affect the presidential race. A Pew Research Center poll this month suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris has picked up would-be Kennedy supporters. It appeared that backing came in some measure from women and non-white voters who previously were leaning toward Kennedy.
But Trump allies say the Kennedy endorsement would be a victory. “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade said Friday morning that the Republican would surely pick up a critical 2 or 3 percentage points with Kennedy’s support. That would be enough, Kilmeade insisted, to swing the campaign back into the GOP’s favor.
Trump is campaigning in Arizona on Friday and posted on social media that he would have a “special guest” at an afternoon rally. On Thursday, Kennedy withdrew from the ballot in Arizona.
Kennedy, a 70-year-old Los Angeles resident, entered the race in April 2023, with a burst of media attention. He showed unusual strength in some early polls for a candidate with no experience in elected office. But his support flagged after Harris emerged last month as the Democrats apparent nominee.
Kennedy’s thoughts about leaving the race became public in recent days, when his vice presidential running mate, Nicole Shanahan, discussed those talks. She said Kennedy might accept a position in a Trump administration, in particular if he thought it could help combat what she called an epidemic of chronic disease.
The transition to Trump stalwart will be greated with skepticism in many circles, given Kennedy’s political DNA and his past description of the Republican as “unhinged” after Trump went on a social media tirade, accusing Kennedy of being a “Democrat plant” and “wasted protest vote”.
“When frightened men take to social media they risk descending into vitriol, which makes them sound unhinged,” Kennedy wrote on X in April. “President Trump’s rant against me is a barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims that should best be resolved in the American tradition of presidential debate.”
Kennedy’s presumed exit from the race comes 16 months after he stood before the media in Boston, scene of many political triumphs for previous generations of the Kennedy clan, which included his father, the New York senator and attorney general and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.
The long-time environmental attorney initially ran as a Democrat. But by October 2023, Kennedy said that he would run as an independent, because party nominating rules made it too difficult to compete, particularly against an incumbent like President Biden.
Kennedy said his independent status would allow him to break the grip on power held by a virtual “uniparty” — the Democrats and Republicans — and that he would be in a better position to cut out-of-control government spending, to take on “Big Pharma” and other corporate interest and to invest more in reversing America’s epidemic of chronic illness.
Even after his shift to an independent campaIgn, and as he courted support from smaller political parties, polls showed Kennedy unable to move within reasonable striking distance of his big party rivals.
Kennedy argued that he should be allowed into the June debate between President Biden and Trump, but he could not persuade the other candidates or networks that he had earned a place on the stage.
Kennedy’s campaign also spent abundant time and money trying to qualify him for the ballot in all 50 states. He suffered a setback last week when a New York judge ruled he shouldn’t appear on the ballot because he listed a “sham” address on nominating petitions.
Thought he presented himself as a pragmatic problem solver, not beholden to big interests, Kennedy’s views on some issues — particularly vaccines — were extreme. A particularly problematic example: When he compared Biden’s vaccine policies to the Holocaust. He suggested that Jews, including Anne Frank, had more freedom under the Nazis than Americans living with COVID-19 mandates.
That drew rebukes from many Jewish groups and even a complaint from his wife, actor Cheryl Hines, who called the Frank reference “reprehensible and insensitive.” Kennedy apologized.
Though born into what some viewed as an American political “Camelot,” Kennedy struggled as a young man, particularly with his 14-year addiction to heroin. The candidate sought to use that ordeal to his advantage, saying that his 40 years in recovery made him uniquely qualified to bring new solutions to the nation’s addiction crisis.
But other aspects of his past, including his past relationships with women, became fodder for new criticism.
That included the regurgitation of a 2013 New York Post story, after the tabloid somehow acquired a journal that RFK Jr. allegedly kept in 2001. It included a log of 37 women that he had sex with when he was married to Mary Richardson Kennedy, the Post and other outlets reported.
(Kennedy’s wife had killed herself in the year prior to publication of the story, but she had reportedly found the journal at some point.)
Early last month, reports about the disturbing behavior resurfaced in a Vanity Fair profile, in which a former family babysitter described how Kennedy groped her when she was in her early 20s and taking care of Kennedy’s four children with Mary. Text messages revealed that the candidate apologized to the former babysitter after publication of the article, though he told reporters he recalled nothing about the alleged misconduct.
Then, in August, a New Yorker profile revealed an odd Kennedy prank. As a grown man, the man known – like his father — as Bobby, once retrieved a dead bear cub from a roadside and deposited the corpse in New York’s Central Park. The carcass provoked a mystery that consumed the city a decade ago.
Kennedy faulted both Biden and Trump, as he criss-crossed the country, trying to spark the kind of momentum his father did in the 1968 race for the White House. But he increasingly lashed out at Biden and the Democrats more, particularly infuriated by the challenges they lodged to his ballot petitions.
As recently as Wednesday, the candidate sent messages like a man still in the fray. One came via a video posted on social media, when he invoked Abraham Lincoln and said “we must realign ourselves with the founding spirit of our nation.”
On Thursday, Shanahan again nodded to the duo’s possible exit from the race. She seemed to relish the way some of her friends pleaded with her not to support Trump.
“My old Dem buddies have been flooding me with frantic calls, texts, and emails,” she wrote on the social media platform X. ”The message was clear: they’re terrified of the idea of our movement joining forces with Donald Trump. When I point out what the Democratic Party and their super PACs have done to sabotage our campaign, their response is always, ‘but Trump is worse.’ Here’s an idea: stop suing us. Let us debate.”
She then suggested, without providing evidence, that the Democrats somehow were “rigging the media and the polls” — the sort of accusations Trump has made many times in the past.
Trump gave no clear indication Thursday of how he might partner with Kennedy. Following Harris’ address to the Democratic convention, the former president went on Fox News for a phone interview.
“I’ve had a great relationship with him over the years. I respect him. He respects me,” Trump told Fox anchor Brett Baier. “I have no idea if he’s going to endorse me.”
He said the Friday appearance of both men in Arizona was a coincidence. “But it’s possible we will be meeting tomorrow,” Trump said.
Politics
Trump says Jack Smith is a 'disgrace' after special counsel resigned from DOJ: 'He left town empty handed!'
President-elect Trump blasted special counsel Jack Smith as a “disgrace” to himself and the country following Smith’s resignation from the Justice Department.
Smith’s resignation was announced in a court filing Saturday.
“The Special Counsel completed his work and submitted his final confidential report on January 7, 2025, and separated from the Department on January 10,” a footnote in the filing said.
Trump took to his social media platform Truth Social on Sunday to criticize Smith for his investigations into the incoming president.
SPECIAL COUNSEL JACK SMITH RESIGNS AFTER 2-YEAR STINT AT DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
President-elect Donald Trump arrives to speak at a news conference at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Friday, Oct. 25, 2024, in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
“Deranged Jack Smith was fired today by the DOJ. He is a disgrace to himself, his family, and his Country. After spending over $100,000,000 on the Witch Hunt against TRUMP, he left town empty handed!” Trump wrote.
Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022 to investigate Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and his mishandling of classified documents.
Smith previously served as acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee in 2017 during Trump’s first administration.
The resignation comes ahead of the release of Smith’s report on the case related to Trump’s role in the attack on the Capitol. A recent court filing revealed that Garland plans to release the report soon, possibly before Trump takes office next week.
Jack Smith, US special counsel, speaks during a news conference in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“As I have made clear regarding every Special Counsel who has served since I took office, I am committed to making as much of the Special Counsel’s report public as possible, consistent with legal requirements and Department policy,” Garland wrote in a recent letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and ranking member Jamie Raskin, D-Md.
A judge from a federal appeals court ruled on Friday against blocking the release of Smith’s report.
After Trump’s presidential election victory in November, Smith filed motions to bring his cases against the president-elect to a close.
Smith asked a judge in late November to drop the charges against Trump in the case related to the Capitol riot. Prior to that request, Smith filed a motion to vacate all deadlines in that case, which was anticipated after Trump’s electoral win.
TRUMP PRESSES GOP TO SWIFTLY SEND ‘ONE POWERFUL BILL’ FOR HIS SIGNATURE ASAP
Special Counsel Jack Smith announces an indictment of former President Donald Trump during a press conference on August 1, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Getty Images)
Trump said after the cases were dropped that they “should never have been brought.”
“These cases, like all of the other cases I have been forced to go through, are empty and lawless, and should never have been brought,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “It was a political hijacking, and a low point in the History of our Country that such a thing could have happened, and yet, I persevered, against all odds, and WON. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Fox News’ Andrea Margolis contributed to this report.
In 2016, the American Bar Assn. couldn’t say enough good things about Merrick Garland, then the chief judge of the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, when it sent the Senate a report giving him its highest rating. So at Garland’s confirmation hearing, a bar official gave senators samples of the unanimous praise from hundreds of lawyers, judges and law professors who were contacted by the group’s evaluators.
“He may be the perfect human being,” effused one anonymous fan. Another: “Judge Garland has no weaknesses.”
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Therein lies the tragedy of Merrick Garland. A man who could have been a truly supreme justice — but for then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s unprecedented Republican blockade — instead became a seemingly ineffectual attorney general, at least regarding the defining challenge of his tenure: holding Donald Trump accountable for trying to steal the 2020 presidential election.
The traits that the bar experts saw as Garland’s strengths — deliberative caution, modesty, judicial temperament, indifference to politics — turned out to be weaknesses for the head of the Justice Department in these times.
So intent was Garland on restoring the department’s independence and integrity — after Trump, in his first term, openly sought to weaponize it against his enemies — that the attorney general initially shied from investigating and prosecuting Trump for his role in the postelection subversions culminating on Jan. 6, 2021. By all accounts, Garland feared the optics of the Justice Department turning its legal powers against the man President Biden had just beaten at the polls.
Of course Trump, the master of projection, was going to, and did, accuse the attorney general of the very thing that Trump himself was guilty of: weaponizing the Justice Department. Yet in a nation based on the rule of law, the case against Trump needed to be pursued.
Garland succeeded in reviving the department’s post-Watergate norms, which restrict contacts between law enforcement officials and the White House, norms that Garland, as a young Justice lawyer in the Carter administration, helped develop in response to Nixon-era abuses. But so much for Garland’s achievement: Trump, saved by his election from having to answer for Jan. 6 or for a separate federal indictment for filching classified documents, will be back in power next week, more emboldened than before and backed by appointees willing to do his vengeful bidding at the Justice Department and the FBI.
Last week, there were small victories for accountability, if not for Trump’s alleged federal crimes. On Friday he was sentenced for his one conviction, in New York state court in May, for falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to a porn star ahead of the 2016 election. Judge Juan M. Merchan gave the president-elect no penalty, but at least the sentencing underscored Trump’s distinction as the only felon-president. Separately, Garland indicated he would make public the final report from special counsel Jack Smith detailing the evidence for Trump’s culpability for Jan. 6.
The 72-year-old attorney general soon leaves office having angered all sides — Republicans for going after Trump at all, Democrats for not going after him fast and hard enough. California Sen. Adam B. Schiff, formerly a member of the House Jan. 6 committee, was among the first Democrats to publicly blame the Justice Department, at least partially, for letting Trump avoid trial before the 2024 election, complaining on CNN that the department had focused too long on “the foot soldiers” who attacked the Capitol “and refrained from looking at … the inciters.”
A recent CNN retrospective on the Trump prosecution called 2021 “the lost year.” At a time when the former president was still on the defensive about Jan. 6, the Justice Department followed a bottom-up strategy targeting more than 1,500 rioters in its largest criminal investigation ever. Prosecutors insisted they were chasing leads involving Trump and close allies, while sorting out the legal complexities of trying a former occupant of the Oval Office.
By 2022, questions about Garland’s deliberative dillydallying became unavoidable. In March, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ruled in a civil case that “the illegality of the [fake electors] plan was obvious.” The next month FBI Director Christopher Wray authorized a criminal investigation into the scheme. Then in June the House Jan. 6 committee held its televised hearings, essentially a daytime drama about Trump’s multipronged efforts to keep power, starring Republican eyewitnesses.
That development, finally, prodded Garland to get serious about the man at the top. In November 2022, Garland named Smith as special counsel. As fast as Smith seemed to work, it wasn’t until August 2023 — two and a half years after the insurrection — that Trump was criminally indicted. Months of legal challenges from the Trump team followed, delaying everything and putting forward what seemed like a crazy claim, that Trump should have presidential immunity.
Yet to point fingers solely at Garland for letting Trump off the hook shifts blame from those even more deserving of it. McConnell, for instance, who engineered Trump’s Senate acquittal in February 2021 after his impeachment for inciting the insurrection; conviction could have been paired with a vote banning Trump from seeking federal office. And the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority, which took seven months before mostly siding with Trump’s claim that he and future presidents are immune from criminal charges for supposedly official acts.
Even if Garland had moved aggressively, there’s a good argument that all the delays available to Trump would’ve made a trial and verdict before the election unlikely. And this fact remains: The ultimate jury — voters — had more than enough incriminating facts available to decide Trump was unfit to be president again. A plurality decided otherwise.
Still, Garland’s performance makes me doubly sad that he ended up at Justice instead of becoming a justice.
@jackiekcalmes
President Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction to Pope Francis on Saturday, granting one of the nation’s highest honors to a figure he called “the People’s Pope.”
“Pope Francis, your humility and your grace are beyond words, and your love for all is unparalleled,” Mr. Biden wrote on X. “You are a light of faith, hope, and love that shines brightly across the world.”
Mr. Biden honored the pontiff during a weekend in which he was scheduled to meet with the pope in person at the Holy See. The president, however, canceled the three-day trip to Italy to coordinate the federal response to raging wildfires in Los Angeles, according to a White House statement.
Rather than the usual award ceremony, in which the president places the award around the neck of the recipient, Mr. Biden posted on X an image from the Oval Office in which a military aide presented the medal. The White House announced the honor after Mr. Biden spoke to Pope Francis on Saturday and informed him of the award.
It was the first time during Mr. Biden’s term that he had awarded the medal “with distinction,” a more prestigious version of the honor. Mr. Biden received the recognition from President Barack Obama in 2017. Other recipients include Pope John Paul II and Colin L. Powell.
Mr. Biden, a Catholic, has seen Pope Francis as an admired ally on the global stage and turned to him as a sounding board, and the pope has lobbied for Mr. Biden to use his presidential power during his final weeks in office.
Last month, Pope Francis called Mr. Biden and asked him to commute the sentences of those on federal death row. Days later, Mr. Biden used his clemency power to soften their sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole, sparing their lives.
A citation included in the White House announcement for the award said that Pope Francis was “unlike any who came before.”
“His mission of serving the poor has never ceased,” the statement read. “A loving pastor, he joyfully answers children’s questions about God. A challenging teacher, he commands us to fight for peace and protect the planet. A welcoming leader, he reaches out to different faiths.”
Mr. Biden awarded the honor days after bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 18 leaders of the political, financial and celebrity establishment.
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